Families struggling as bills begin to bite

For the two weeks in every month that her husband Jim is working offshore, abseiling off the side of oil rigs to check and replace gas detector units, Sharon Wall is at home with their four young children. As Wall does not drive, and their home town of Peterhead, near Aberdeen, is not well stocked with affordable, good quality food shops within walking distance, feeding the junior Walls is a little more complicated than for most families.

The first thing that Jim Wall does on his way home is call in at a large Tesco on the outskirts of Aberdeen, to buy "a bit of everything". Though the family has a weekly box of vegetables delivered from a local farmers' market, and toiletry essentials are mailed from Avon, his return is eagerly expected.

"I always fill the fridge and freezers up before I go, and then when I come back I have to do it all over again," he says. "I know the cupboards will be pretty bare by that stage." The couple say their weekly food bill is usually around £150, though in the last four days they've spent £220. A few years ago, they reckon, they spent about £100 a week, though they acknowledge feeding the family was a bit more straightforward before the arrival of three-year-old Jessica and one-year-old Sophie. All four children, Sharon Wall says, "love to eat".

"Bread and milk are classic examples," says her husband. "I think it was about 75p for a loaf of Asda bread just a couple of months back, now it's up to just under the £1 mark."

"I tend to go in and do quite a small shop when he's away, and what used to cost me £20, £25, now that's up to £35, almost £40, for pretty much the same amount of stuff," says Sharon Wall. "I was in the other day and I thought, oh, I've got hardly anything here and it's come to £20 at Asda!"

The numbers and the precise circumstances may vary, but in recent months the Walls' experience has found echoes in family budgets up and down Britain. The global commodity price hikes that have led to riots and civil disorder from Haiti to west Africa to the Philippines may have been greeted, in this country, with British stoicism, but for many, food price rises - a pound here, £10 there - are starting to hurt.

Bread costs 20% more than it did a year ago, according to a survey earlier this month by the price comparison site mysupermarket.com, and rice 60% more. Pasta has gone up by 81% in some shops, and in Tesco it was found to be 113% more expensive. Butter costs 60% more than it did, meat prices too are up. The site puts the annual rise at 19.1%. Though industry observers point out that this figure includes prices from the more expensive Waitrose but not the promotion-focused Morrisons or any budget supermarket chains such as Lidl, it represents the sharpest rise in food prices since records began.

"The odd thing is that a lot of people seem to have only just noticed," says Alex Beckett, a food specialist at the industry magazine The Grocer. "In fact, food prices have been going up for quite some time, but they have dramatically soared in the last 18 months."

In his small local Asda on a Peterhead housing estate, Jim Wall pauses in front of a rack of loaves, running through his head the small, familiar calculations - 5p, 12p, 24p - that can make the difference between ending the month overdrawn, and not. Warburtons farmhouse loaves, the family favourite, are £1.12 each. Asda does a simple sliced white loaf for 65p. He puts two loaves of Asda Baker's Gold, 95p each, in his trolley.

"I suppose this is a bit nicer than the plain Asda loaf, but cheaper than your Warburtons and your Kingsmill. For years we bought Warburtons, but when you're going through almost a loaf of bread a day that 17p does make a difference." He thinks the pricier loaf cost 74p six months ago. They'd like to feed the children "seedy bread", as they call it, every day, but that's at least £1.40 a loaf.

Eggs, too, involve a compromise: "I really don't like the way battery chickens are kept, but six plain eggs are just 88p, and here you have 12 free range for £2.92." In the end he compromises with a dozen "barn eggs" for £2.52. On cereals, juice, dishwasher rinse aid, washing up liquid, the Asda own brand is chosen.

But it is not just branded items that are proving too costly. Sharon Wall researches food extensively; their second son Stuart, eight, is on the autistic spectrum, and they have learned over the years that different foods can affect his moods and behaviour.

Food miles, pesticides, and fair trade also concern them, she says, but these days ethics can feel something of an expensive luxury. "We try to get bits of organic food, I try to get the fair trade coffee. Price comes into it, though. Some weeks I try to pick up the fair trade coffee, whereas other weeks I think, I just can't afford it this week."

If the current climate is squeezing consumers, it is also proving a challenge to the supermarket chains. Factory gate prices - the amount manufacturers charge retailers - may have risen sharply but supermarkets insist their prices across the board are increasing only marginally.

Just days after reporting a 28% increase in annual profits, shares in Sainsbury's fell earlier this month amid predictions that the market is about to become "a lot tougher". The signs, even small ones, are everywhere. After seven years, Waitrose ditched an advertising slogan which made a virtue of its higher cost - "quality food, honestly priced" - in favour of something more egalitarian: "Everyone deserves quality food. Everyone deserves Waitrose."

Stores look rather different than they used to: budget and own-brand ranges, once the faintly embarrassing end of product lines, are now found front and centre in displays. Tesco says its 9,000 current promotions are the most in its history, Asda has 5,000. Thirty per cent of Sainsbury's products are promotional offers, the store says, compared with 20% this time last year.

Meanwhile super-budget chains, imported from Europe, are flourishing. Aldi reports a 25% increase in customer numbers in the past three months. Lidl, already with 400 stores, is planning 40 new ones. "We need more sites to develop," reads the Netto website. "Do you own land or property which may be suitable for a new Netto store?"

"It is certainly a challenge to get the products which people expect to be on the shelves at the right price," says Andrew Opie, food policy director at the British Retail Consortium, which represents leading British supermarket chains. "Some problems, when it comes to commodity prices, are out of their hands, though the retailers have tried to prepare by having a flexible food chain, negotiating with suppliers. They see themselves as trying to absorb costs to insulate consumers from the worst vagaries of the harvests, while at the same time taking advantage of products where there is good availability, such as fruit and vegetables, or sugar, some meat prices, and get those promoted as an alternative. We are seeing more promotions than ever, and these tend to be geared towards straightforward reductions in price, rather than bogofs ["buy one get one free" offers]."

The Wall family welcome offers, of course, but with reservations. Asda may be wallpapered with promotions but, says Jim Wall, "the things that aren't good for you, the cookies and the cakes and the crisps, are the things that are on offer". Although shoppers are greeted by a large display of discounted cheddar, and an offer on potatoes has proved so popular they have sold out, among the most prominent promotions today are Cadbury Mini Rolls, Mr Kipling Victoria Mini Classics, and Asda Jumbo Milk Chocolate Cookies.

As Scots almost at the end of the transport line, the Walls are perhaps more disadvantaged than most as Scottish food prices, already the highest in Britain, are rising more rapidly than those south of the border.

But they may also find themselves ahead of the debate. In response to high prices, faltering production and the country's notoriously poor nutrition, the Scottish parliament late last year initiated a "national food debate", towards formulating a comprehensive policy for food provision and access north of the border. This, argue some, is a conversation that needs to happen more broadly in the £1-a-loaf climate. For as long as Britain consumes so much more than it produces - and bins £10bn-worth of food a year, including, every day, 550,000 chickens and 5.1m potatoes - they argue that talk of supermarket prices is topsy-turvy at best.

"The whole story has been pitched as a global problem, and it is, but this is a British problem," says Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University and arguably Britain's leading expert on the subject. "We are a flagrantly wasteful, inappropriate, uneconomic food system and we are pretending that this is China's or Brazil's problem. People like me have been saying for years that this situation was coming. I am not being a clever clogs. I'm just not sure the politicians have caught up with it, frankly."

The "leave it to Tesco et al" approach, he says, demonstrably cannot work in sorting out the enormous global forces behind the price hikes. "I'm afraid that not even Tesco or Sainsbury, not even the mighty Wal-Mart, can sort out climate change, or the impending water crisis in food, the nutrition transition [the shift in rapidly industrialising countries from simple to highly processed and often unhealthy diets] and its associated health problems, population growth, the labour crisis which is creeping upon us. Who are going to be the agricultural workers? Who are going to pick our strawberries?"

Just as falling house prices are seen by many as a "corrective" to an unrealistically inflated market, Lang argues that rising food prices may be an overdue - if painful - reflection of the true cost of our food. Britain may have to learn to produce more and consume less, and pay more for the privilege.

Back in Peterhead, Jim Wall is preparing the children's tea.

On the menu this evening: grapes, yoghurts, and chicken sandwiches. The boys have theirs on healthy "seedy bread", but for the two younger girls, tonight, it's the cheaper, white sliced bread. Tomorrow, it will be their turn.